Products > Test Equipment
Where will Oscilloscopes and DMM's be in 10yrs ?
<< < (8/18) > >>
switchabl:
Well, let's say we were designing a budget oscilloscope and our market research found that suddenly absolutely no one wants to buy anything with a noisy fan anymore (although for some reason most of the survey participants had the same IP address based in Italy, weird that). So we decide to make silent operation a prime design goal and "go to town". Good thermal design is free after all, right? So what do we do?
- massive custom heatsinks help; they are also expensive and require mechanical support
- bigger, slower fans are a lot quieter; and you will probably need to design a new, bigger case to fit them
- well, if we are designing a new case and have new injection moulds made, at least we can re-design for better airflow as well (maybe hire a specialist?)
- oh no, the PSU has minimum airflow requirements we don't meet anymore; well, not to despair, we just get a more expensive one with higher-rated parts; or, how about a custom one that integrates nicely with our new case, I mean how much can that really cost?
- our main board may now run a bit hotter, that may be bad for realibility. Oh well, let's order some Nichicon 105°C caps and use the Crapxxon stockpile for something else instead.
- we also have a potential for larger temperature-gradients in the frontend now; may need to loosen some of the specs a bit? Or find some lower TC parts?
- the old model had a lot of headroom when it comes to cooling really, we figured "better safe than sorry" and were fairly confident it would be able to take almost anything customers would throw at it even with the vents all clogged up after a couple of years; we're flying a lot closer to the sun now but we'll just do really thorough environmental testing, so we will be fine

Fast forward to the launch date... Well, it was tough, but we made it.  :phew: Ok, kinda. There were a lot of delays because of all the custom parts and the re-designs. Also the bike-shedding in design review meetings, everyone is a bloody expert in thermal design now, it was basically like reddit in there, soo annoying. And there was that embarassing incident when a prototype set a customer's lab on fire. But the software people say the fan-control bug is fixed now.  :-// So some minor features didn't get done in time and we moved most of the devs over to the new spectrum analyzer project. We just tell customers that "there is no public roadmap for new features at this time but software development is ongoing". It's not a lie either, Karen comes in twice a week to fix some bugs. Anyway, it's mostly just statistics and some weird memory-management stuff that no-one cares about that's missing. And it's just twice the price of our direct competitor's product, which is soo much louder.

It's a great day, it's just a little sad that our social media manager quit today because he "couldn't take the abuse anymore". Some guy calling himself balnazzar was spamming rants everywhere about how the new scope "has really bad price/performance" and is "useless because it doesn't have basic features" and that he would rather use a rusty nail and a light bulb.

* I originally wanted to write a serious post about thermal design but I am currently home sick and may not quite be my normal boring self. There is stilll a serious point here: nothing is free, there are almost always trade-offs.
2N3055:

--- Quote from: switchabl on October 24, 2022, 11:11:35 pm ---Well, let's say we were designing a budget oscilloscope and our market research found that suddenly absolutely no one wants to buy anything with a noisy fan anymore (although for some reason most of the survey participants had the same IP address based in Italy, weird that). So we decide to make silent operation a prime design goal and "go to town". Good thermal design is free after all, right? So what do we do?
- massive custom heatsinks help; they are also expensive and require mechanical support
- bigger, slower fans are a lot quieter; and you will probably need to design a new, bigger case to fit them
- well, if we are designing a new case and have new injection moulds made, at least we can re-design for better airflow as well (maybe hire a specialist?)
- oh no, the PSU has minimum airflow requirements we don't meet anymore; well, not to despair, we just get a more expensive one with higher-rated parts; or, how about a custom one that integrates nicely with our new case, I mean how much can that really cost?
- our main board may now run a bit hotter, that may be bad for realibility. Oh well, let's order some Nichicon 105°C caps and use the Crapxxon stockpile for something else instead.
- we also have a potential for larger temperature-gradients in the frontend now; may need to loosen some of the specs a bit? Or find some lower TC parts?
- the old model had a lot of headroom when it comes to cooling really, we figured "better safe than sorry" and were fairly confident it would be able to take almost anything customers would throw at it even with the vents all clogged up after a couple of years; we're flying a lot closer to the sun now but we'll just do really thorough environmental testing, so we will be fine

Fast forward to the launch date... Well, it was tough, but we made it.  :phew: Ok, kinda. There were a lot of delays because of all the custom parts and the re-designs. Also the bike-shedding in design review meetings, everyone is a bloody expert in thermal design now, it was basically like reddit in there, soo annoying. And there was that embarassing incident when a prototype set a customer's lab on fire. But the software people say the fan-control bug is fixed now.  :-// So some minor features didn't get done in time and we moved most of the devs over to the new spectrum analyzer project. We just tell customers that "there is no public roadmap for new features at this time but software development is ongoing". It's not a lie either, Karen comes in twice a week to fix some bugs. Anyway, it's mostly just statistics and some weird memory-management stuff that no-one cares about that's missing. And it's just twice the price of our direct competitor's product, which is soo much louder.

It's a great day, it's just a little sad that our social media manager quit today because he "couldn't take the abuse anymore". Some guy calling himself balnazzar was spamming rants everywhere about how the new scope "has really bad price/performance" and is "useless because it doesn't have basic features" and that he would rather use a rusty nail and a light bulb.

* I originally wanted to write a serious post about thermal design but I am currently home sick and may not quite be my normal boring self. There is stilll a serious point here: nothing is free, there are almost always trade-offs.

--- End quote ---

Ahahhahaah brilliant!! Love it! :-DD
mawyatt:

--- Quote from: switchabl on October 24, 2022, 11:11:35 pm ---Well, let's say we were designing a budget oscilloscope and our market research found that suddenly absolutely no one wants to buy anything with a noisy fan anymore (although for some reason most of the survey participants had the same IP address based in Italy, weird that). So we decide to make silent operation a prime design goal and "go to town". Good thermal design is free after all, right? So what do we do?
.............
* I originally wanted to write a serious post about thermal design but I am currently home sick and may not quite be my normal boring self. There is stilll a serious point here: nothing is free, there are almost always trade-offs.

--- End quote ---

Sounds very similar to a group of folks discussing a high performance custom chip design, with none have ever designed a chip or likely high performance anything before, yet somehow are self proclaimed "experts" in such :o

Couple of cases in point:

About 4 decades ago we were tasked with designing a passive portable remote sensing chemical agent detector for battlefield use. A part of the spec was altered to require surviving a Point Blank Thermal Nuclear Detonation!! Common sense says, which we unsuccessfully argued, who really cares about a potential chemical attack when you've just been nuked, and everything left standing is highly radioactive |O

We passed the test (blast Heat and Pressure Wavefront and EMP), and his single requirement likely tripled the instrument cost!!

Another case involved a custom CMOS specialized ADC chip on a custom hybrid, a special requirement invoked was the hybrid had to survive a discharge from 25KV at 500 ohm source impedance, yep 50 amps peak!! This was likely someone that found the Body CMOS ESD spec and decided to "augment" it to make the system better. We passed, but the others involved didn't, eventually the spec was reduced to the usual CMOS ESD spec so the others could deliver their part of the system.

Anyway, randomly tossed around specs can significantly drive the development and production cost and need to be carefully evaluated before invoking!!

Best,
Martin.M:
balnazzar:

--- Quote from: switchabl on October 24, 2022, 11:11:35 pm ---Well, let's say we were designing a budget oscilloscope and our market research found that suddenly absolutely no one wants to buy anything with a noisy fan anymore (although for some reason most of the survey participants had the same IP address based in Italy, weird that). So we decide to make silent operation a prime design goal and "go to town". Good thermal design is free after all, right? So what do we do?
- massive custom heatsinks help; they are also expensive and require mechanical support
- bigger, slower fans are a lot quieter; and you will probably need to design a new, bigger case to fit them
- well, if we are designing a new case and have new injection moulds made, at least we can re-design for better airflow as well (maybe hire a specialist?)
- oh no, the PSU has minimum airflow requirements we don't meet anymore; well, not to despair, we just get a more expensive one with higher-rated parts; or, how about a custom one that integrates nicely with our new case, I mean how much can that really cost?
- our main board may now run a bit hotter, that may be bad for realibility. Oh well, let's order some Nichicon 105°C caps and use the Crapxxon stockpile for something else instead.
- we also have a potential for larger temperature-gradients in the frontend now; may need to loosen some of the specs a bit? Or find some lower TC parts?
- the old model had a lot of headroom when it comes to cooling really, we figured "better safe than sorry" and were fairly confident it would be able to take almost anything customers would throw at it even with the vents all clogged up after a couple of years; we're flying a lot closer to the sun now but we'll just do really thorough environmental testing, so we will be fine

Fast forward to the launch date... Well, it was tough, but we made it.  :phew: Ok, kinda. There were a lot of delays because of all the custom parts and the re-designs. Also the bike-shedding in design review meetings, everyone is a bloody expert in thermal design now, it was basically like reddit in there, soo annoying. And there was that embarassing incident when a prototype set a customer's lab on fire. But the software people say the fan-control bug is fixed now.  :-// So some minor features didn't get done in time and we moved most of the devs over to the new spectrum analyzer project. We just tell customers that "there is no public roadmap for new features at this time but software development is ongoing". It's not a lie either, Karen comes in twice a week to fix some bugs. Anyway, it's mostly just statistics and some weird memory-management stuff that no-one cares about that's missing. And it's just twice the price of our direct competitor's product, which is soo much louder.

It's a great day, it's just a little sad that our social media manager quit today because he "couldn't take the abuse anymore". Some guy calling himself balnazzar was spamming rants everywhere about how the new scope "has really bad price/performance" and is "useless because it doesn't have basic features" and that he would rather use a rusty nail and a light bulb.

* I originally wanted to write a serious post about thermal design but I am currently home sick and may not quite be my normal boring self. There is stilll a serious point here: nothing is free, there are almost always trade-offs.

--- End quote ---

Well, isn't this a gigantic spamming rant from someone who has half my # of posts (and I came here literally the other day), and either is some kind of minus habens or a person that intentionally pretends not to understand, and makes out of place use of hyperbolas. Rarely I've read posts so bestrewn with fallacies, but mainly https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/black-or-white

Simply read or watch any review of the R&S RTB2000. It's barely audible. Same price of its A-brand competitors, or a bit less. Same size.

Does this simple observation provide a reply to your long list of silly and ill-articulated points?


--- Quote from: 2N3055 on October 25, 2022, 06:16:14 am ---
Ahahhahaah brilliant!! Love it! :-DD

--- End quote ---

Some prefer to behave not like the average high-school bully, but like his follower, the cowardly one.  ::)
Navigation
Message Index
Next page
Previous page
There was an error while thanking
Thanking...

Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod